Somali refugees arrive in the U.S. at a rate of more than 800 per month, filing into more than 300 U.S. cities and towns from U.N. refugee camps such as this one in Dadaab, Kenya.

A recently retired U.S. State Department veteran has published a whistleblower letter in the Chicago Tribune fingering the refugee resettlement program as fraught with “fraud” and “abuses.”

Mary Doetsch said the problems were apparent before President Obama took office but got worse under his leadership and that she “fully supports” President Trump’s executive order to temporarily halt the program to improve the vetting process.

“I fully support President Donald Trump’s executive order that temporarily halts admissions from the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program and bans travel from nationals of countries that potentially pose a security risk to the United States; however, I don’t think the action goes far enough. Further, I believe there are many people throughout the country who feel the same way,” she writes.

She refutes the narrative of the Obama State Department, repeated by its nonprofit contractors at Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Services and myriad other lobbyists and supporters including some members of Congress, that refugees are the “most vetted” and “most scrutinized” of all travelers to the United States.

Doetsch retired about two months ago as a refugee coordinator. One of her assignments was at a United Nations refugee camp in Jordan, from which many of the Syrian refugees are flowing into the U.S. She did three tours of duty, in Cairo, Egypt, dealing with Middle East refugees; in Vienna, Austria, with mostly African refugees coming in through Malta; and in Cuba.

Her letter affirms two-and-a-half years of reporting by WND, which has reported that the “vetting” of refugees from broken countries such as Somalia, Syria and Sudan often consists largely of a personal interview with the refugee. These countries have no law enforcement data to vet against the personal story relayed to the U.S. government about the refugee’s background. Sometimes even their name and identity is fabricated and they have no documentation, such as a valid passport, or they have fraudulent documentation.

“As a recently retired 25-year veteran of the U.S. Department of State who served almost eight years as a refugee coordinator throughout the Middle East, Africa, Russia and Cuba, I have seen first-hand the abuses and fraud that permeate the refugee program and know about the entrenched interests that fight every effort to implement much-needed reform. Despite claims of enhanced vetting, the reality is that it is virtually impossible to vet an individual who has no type of an official record, particularly in countries compromised by terrorism. U.S. immigration officials simply rely on the person’s often rehearsed and fabricated ‘testimony.’ I have personally seen this on hundreds of occasions.”

“I saw the exploitations, inconsistencies and security lapses in the program, and I advocated strongly for change. Nonetheless, during the past decade and specifically under the Obama administration, the Refugee Admissions Program continued to expand blindly, seemingly without concern for security or whether it served the best interests of its own citizens.

She highlighted the situation of African boat people who arrive on the European island of Malta seeking asylum. These illegal aliens in Malta are magically turned into “refugees” by the United Nations and shipped to the United States. She writes:

“For instance, the legally questionable resettlement of refugees from Malta to the United States grew substantially, despite the fact that as a European country with a functioning asylum system, ‘refugees’ should have remained there under the internationally accepted concept of ‘the country of first asylum.’ Similarly, the ‘special’ in-country refugee programs in Cuba and Russia continue, although they are laden with fraud and far too often simply admit economic migrants rather than actual refugees.

“As an insider who understands its operations, politics and weaknesses, I believe the refugee program must change dramatically and the courts must allow the president to fully implement the order.”

The United Nations selects the refugees sent to the United States, a problem Trump and others have indicated needs to be rectified.

The U.S. has imported more than 3 million refugees since the Refugee Act of 1980, more than a million of them from hostile Muslim countries with jihadist strongholds.

The refugees are distributed by Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopalian, evangelical and Jewish groups to more than 300 U.S. cities and towns, often with no advance notice of how many will be coming and from what countries. These religious groups sign a contract with the federal government agreeing not to proselytize the refugees in return for payments. The government pays these contractors just over $2,000 per refugee and they get to keep about half of that fee. Yet, these same agencies pitch the program to cities and states on humanitarian and charitable grounds, rarely disclosing their vested financial interest in the program’s expansion.

The program became controversial only in the last two years as the Syrian civil war heated up and created millions of refugees, several hundred thousand of them bound for Western democracies. That led to a historic population shift as other Third-World “refugees” from Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere joined the march toward Europe, Canada and, to a lesser but still significant extent, the United States.